2 June 2014

J. R. R. Tolkien’s Writing Habits

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, English writer, poet and Professor of English Language and
Literature at Oxford, is best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of
the Rings.

It is hard to be certain of the exact figures, due to the
proliferation of ebook versions, but The Lord of the Rings is the biggest-selling single genre novel of all time and
possibly the best-selling single novel of all time.

Surviving the horrors of the Somme as a second lieutenant
in the Lancashire Fusiliers , when his battalion was almost completely wiped out,
Tolkien began writing to help his recovery from trench fever. His first work, The
Book of Lost Tales, was a collection of short stories, where he
developed the ideas for his later work, with the subtitle ‘The History of
Middle Earth’.

One hot summer day he was bored marking endless examination papers and found
that one candidate had left an entire page of an answer-book blank. On this
page, Tolkien wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit“. (See interview below.) It took Tolkien seven years
to turn that sentence into The Hobbit
and he struggled to get the manuscript finished because of his teaching
commitments at Oxford College.

Writing habits

Tolkien once
said his typical response on reading a medieval work was not to make a critical
study of it, but instead to write a modern work in the same tradition. A
prolific letter-writer, Tolkien suffered from severe rheumatism and would
apologise for not handwriting his correspondence. “I usually type,” he wrote in
one letter, “since my ‘hand’ tends to start fair and rapidly fall into
picturesque inscrutability.”

Tolkien's
favourite typewriter was an expensive American Hammond Varitype, made in 1927. Insead of conventional typebars, it had a replaceable
C-shaped curved rubber type-plate (which anticipated the IBM "golf
ball" by fifty years). Tolkien could therefore change the typewriter "font"
which included italics, which he used a great deal, as well as the small font
he called ‘midget type’. The Hammond Varitype
was the most advanced ‘word processor’ of its day and produced such fine work
that they were used as "cold typesetting" devices, to prepare
camera-ready copy for printing.

Later in
life, Tolkien found the Hammond too heavy and turned to more portable typewriters.
Despite the pain it caused, he often wrote detailed notes about Middle Earth in
longhand with a pen, before switching to his typewriter. He typed the entire
manuscript of The Lord of the Rings
twice in his favourite writing space - on his bed in an attic. In a letter
written in 1964, he wrote to a friend: “I like typewriters; and my dream is of
suddenly finding myself rich enough to have an electric typewriter built to my
specifications, to type the Fëanorian script.”

The manuscripts, typescripts and proofs for The Hobbit survive in the Memorial
Library Archives at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and give a
useful insight into Tolkien’s writing methods.
The collection includes a working draft of the first twelve pages, typed
on Tolkien's Hammond typewriter. The rest of the pages are handwritten and
numbered consecutively from 13 to 167, and Tolkien changes the type of paper
and uses a different pen near the beginning of Chapter 5.

The next stage of development is a full typescript done
on the Hammond typewriter, with the songs typed in italics and the only changes
being to the names of characters. (Interestingly, to modern writers with the benefit
of word processing, there is also a second full typescript, which seems to
have been abandoned due to the significant number of typographical mistakes).

Tolkien later recalled, “I wrote the first chapter first,
then forgot about it, then I wrote another part. I myself can still see the gaps. There is a very big gap
after they reach the eyrie of the Eagles. After that I really didn't know how
to go on. I just spun a yarn out of any elements in my head. I don't remember
organizing the thing at all."

Always
modest about his work, Tolkien wrote in a letter about The
Lord of the Rings in July
1947, “I certainly hope to leave behind me the whole thing revised and in final
form, for the world to throw into the waste-paper basket. All books come there in the end, in this
world, anyway.” He was surprised by the success of his
first book and also of the others, and felt his best-selling success was a
complete accident.

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